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Message: <blockquote data-quote="VelvetViolet" data-source="post: 6330562" data-attributes="member: 6686357">Something I've been wanting to do for a while was to create an OGC "great polyhedron" cosmology inspired by AD&D and 4e, with some influence from Beyond Countless Doorways and mimir.net, to better foster planar adventures.I entertained the idea to reorient the elemental and energy planes as poles, between which existed the far more survivable (and adventurous) Elemental Plane singular. It's similar in concept to the Elemental Chaos from 4e, but without having the Abyss and Limbo and other extraneous stuff, and also includes various demi-, para- and quasi-elemental concepts like Acid, Lightning and Obsidian and associated elemental creatures (although there isn't a defined number or formula for these, it's GM fodder). There are new inner planes/poles of Dreams (a counterpart to the Shadow Plane), Gravity, Psionics (possibly the same as the plane of Dreams or a related demiplane of ectoplasm or something), and Time. (OGC from 3pp sourcebooks Classic Play: The Book of the Planes, Slayer's Guide to Elementals, Tome of Horrors Complete, and Tome of Horrors 4.)A personal favorite of mine are the various new transition and nexus planes (in addition to the Ethereal and Astral) like the River of Worlds, the Vortex, the Wormholes, the Grand Orrery of All Reflected Heavens, the Wandering Inn of the Glorious Toad, and Dunmorgause Castle. (OGC from 3pp Portals & Planes and Classic Play: The Book of the Planes.)Another personal favorite (as I'm sure many others can empathize with) were the outer planes. As with the inner planes, I think it would be best served by making the nine alignments into poles which the outer planes would exist between. There isn't a define number of outer planes or layers in this scheme, but the overall concepts of planes for each alignment and tendency remains. This is commonly modeled as the "great wheel" of the outer planes, but it isn't really a wheel so much as the connections between the nine basic alignments. A rough, preliminary model is presented below:[ATTACH]62637[/ATTACH]These poles are meant to be generic, able to contain all mythological, literary and homebrewed afterlives. For example, Arcadia would include the Ghibli Hills, Hyperborea would also contain the planes of Winterheim and Asgard and Valhalla and Gladsheim and Jotunheim and Alfheim, Kunlun would contain the planes of Shangri-La and Shambhala, the Manifold Hells would contain both the nine hells of Dante's Inferno and the courts of the millions upon millions of hells in Chinese mythology, and Paradise would have the twin paradises of Gulistan and Bostan in al-Jannah. Then there are nexus and connecting planes like the rivers/lakes/byways of Aornis/Avernus, Acheron, Styx, Cocytus, Phlegeton, the branches of Yggdrasil/Sephirotic Tree of Life, the coils of the great serpent Jormungand, the River Oceanus, the Outer Rifts of the Abyss, the Chasm above the lower planes through which evil souls fall like rain and the Infernum below it that connects all the lower planes, et cetera.There also wouldn't simply be only a few groupings of alignment exemplars (demons, angels, proteans, axiomites, etc) there would be many more, like the Chaosiic, Ogdoad, and Solumians for the planes of chaos. A problem I had with the demons in particular was that they were in many ways identical to devils (a criticism raised by 4e), having elaborate hierarchies, obsessed with acquiring souls, and many castes being scheming manipulators completely unsuited for the infinite deathtrap blighting reality that is the Abyssal Plane. Under this system, those more eloquent or long-sighted demons can be moved to Perdition, the border plane/pole of selfish apathetic hedonism rather than "they're destroying everything," without going to the effort of changing their flavor or statistics. I entertained the idea of making Asuras and Devas (the angelic  choirs) inherently psionic as part of a thing about Eastern-style  spiritual enlightenment giving psionics as part of the  package.Thoughts?</blockquote>

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